The Sean McDowell Show - Debating Miracles: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue about the Supernatural

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Are miracles real or just ancient myths? Is there evidence they still occur today? I was recently invited to speak at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo alongside Dr. Paul Rinzler, an atheist professor, to examine whether miracles still occur in the modern world. Whether you're a believer, skeptic, or somewhere in between, this respectful but thought-provoking exchange will challenge how you think about the supernatural. Enjoy, and please share with a friend.*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowellTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=enInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Well, I'd like to thank the Veritas Forum for inviting me tonight. It's a great privilege. And I'd also like to thank my wife, Robin, for helping me think through some of these issues. Robin, your help, as always, is invaluable. One other small note, I'm getting over a cold. I have a lingering cough. So if I cough a little bit tonight, please forgive me. So I think the most important thing to focus on is to figure out how we're going to know if a miracle happened or not.

And I'm going to focus on miracles. Let's take one of the more extreme cases of miracles, the ones that do violate natural law. We have very, very strong knowledge. There we go. We have very, very strong knowledge. natural law about how atoms and chemicals and molecules work that says that you can't walk on liquid water and you can't be raised from the dead. So if you want to claim something like that, you have to have so much evidence of such good quality that it overwhelms the

already strongly confirmed evidence that we have about how all that works. That's not impossible to do. One way to improve the case for miracles is to add in the possibility of God. I looked for a photograph of God online, but everything was just a painting or a drawing, so that's all I have. Sorry. Seriously. If we can show that God exists,

that will help the case for miracles, because we will have a way to circumvent natural law and therefore the weight of its evidence. So let's see what happens. So we need to show that God exists and that miracles happen. But we have to show each of them independently, and here's why. Let's start with this. If you want to show that God exists in support of miracles,

you can't use miracles to show that God exists because you're using God to show that miracles exist, and that would be a circular argument you're assuming what you're trying to prove. You have to show that God exists without assuming miracles happen at all, and then if you're successful, you can use God's existence to help show that miracles happen, and more on that very soon. The second option is to try to show that happen, particularly the resurrection, in order to prove that God exists. But this means that you can't use the existence of God to prove that miracles happen because that would be another circular argument. Also in this second option, the existence of God is off the table. So the immense weight of natural law against miracles still holds and is not circumvented by God because the existence of God is what we're trying to prove in this second option. The second option, I think, I hope should be uncontroversial. If we don't know that God exists, then proof of miracles has an extremely high bar

of natural law to overcome. And I'm not aware of a miracle claim that's done that. Now back to the first option, where we're going to use God's existence to show that miracles happen. You can't use miracles to show that God exists. This first option is more interesting. Several arguments have been offered

to show the existence of God without reference to miracles. There is the cosmological argument, the design argument, and the argument from the soul and the moral argument. The one problem they all share is that they don't go where we want them to go. First of all, they don't claim that the Christian God exists, merely that some kind of transcendent being

that created the universe exists, which is basically the definition of a God. But crucially, there's nothing in those arguments that make it likely that the God they would argue for would care to perform a miracle. They only argue for what's called a deistic God, one that created the universe but doesn't intervene at all, including through miracles.

In fact, Occam's Razor, the logical principle that says don't add things to an explanation unnecessarily, tells us to prefer the deistic God. So at least for this class of miracles, I don't see any way to conclude at least yet tonight that they happen, at least for the time being. So if we can't say that a miracle happened like the resurrection, and if Jesus wasn't resurrected, that means that Christianity isn't true, which means that God doesn't exist. So where does that leave us?

It leaves us here. I don't know if you can see that, but on the right-hand side, about halfway up, right kind of there, there's a little blue dot, a pale blue dot, and that's the name of this picture, the pale blue dot.

It was taken by the Voyager spacecraft way out in space, and that pale blue dot is the planet Earth. That project was spearheaded by the great astronomer Carl Sagan. And here's what he says about that picture. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of.

Every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines. every hunter and forger, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a moat of dust in a thundee. Think of the rivers of blood, by all those generals and emperors so that they could become momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."

End quote. The universe is a big place. We literally cannot comprehend how big it is and how much emptiness is there, and that emptiness is cold and without pity. If you don't like the universe being cold and pitiless, I have my own good news for you. You can do something about it. First, recognize that we're not separate from the universe.

from the universe were part of it. It's been said that people are a way for part of the universe to become conscious of itself. People are part of the universe, people are conscious, therefore part of the universe is conscious. If we acknowledge that we are all together on that minuscule pale dot and treat each other with warmth and kindness and recognition of that fact, it is another fact that part of this cold, pitiless universe will have found a way to become warm and kind. will literally have overcome the brutal nature of the universe, at least in one tiny little part of it, the tiny little part of it that is you. That's an amazing achievement, and I recommend it to you very highly.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Long, Dr. Rinsler, and the Veritas team for putting this on tonight. Are miracles happening today? Is it reasonable to believe in miraculous? Seems to me a helpful place to begin with is a trip I took to see what is believed to have been the largest tree that has ever existed. You're wondering, how does this relate to anything? Hang on. Not long ago, I had a chance to go to Sequoia National Park and sit at the base of what is actually called the Chicago stump. It used to be called the General Noble Tree.

18 men arm and arm can wrap around the base of this. It's believed to be about 3,200 years old. Now, reports started spreading to people about these massive trees, but many people wouldn't believe them. So in 1898, some explorers came and chopped it down and carried it, much of it, to the Chicago World Fair to display it for people. And still, many people wouldn't believe. You can actually read about it. It's called the Great California Hoax.

Now, I thought the great California hoax was our state budget, but I digress. Now, what's interesting about this is people had eyewitness testimony of seeing these trees. They actually saw it physically, but many still didn't believe. The question is why? And what I think this points out is the power of assumptions that we all have about reality. whether there's a God or not a God, whether naturalistic phenomena can explain everything. If you come as a committed naturalist here and believe God doesn't exist or everything can be explained naturally, there's probably nothing I could say to convince you of the supernatural.

But if you think God exists or maybe exists, we might have a different conversation. Now, why do I believe that God exists? Paul hinted at a few arguments that are typically given for the existence of God. One I would point towards is the origin of the universe. The surprising discovery that the universe had a beginning, I think best points towards a cause outside of the universe to bring it into existence. The surprising cause of the fine-tuning of the universe points towards the best cause, a fine-tuner who fastened it for life.

Third, the origin of life, the incredible complexity in the cell and in DNA, I think best points towards a mind or an intelligent agent. Fourth, moral values and duties. If we have objective moral values and duties and there's an objective moral law, arguably the best explanation is a moral law giver. Another argument is the origin of consciousness. There is no naturalistic explanation for consciousness. And yet if God is a conscious being, it makes sense that we would be conscience. These arguments actually move us beyond a deistic God, because this is a God who is arguably created life and given us consciousness, so is on some level already involved in the process. But it turns out, I'm actually not alone in believing in the supernatural.

In fact, most Americans do so. A Pew Research Poll from 2023, eight in ten Americans believe in something spiritual beyond the natural world. In an article in Business Wire, 75% of U.S. doctors believe in miracles, and according to this study, that over half reported what they believed

to have been a miracle that they personally witnessed. In a Chinese-sponsored state authorized church, over half of conversions are attributed to what people consider faith healing experiences. Over half, that's millions or tens of millions of people who have incentive not to believe interestingly enough. But it's not just for the uneducated. In fact, in 1991, 30% with grad degrees in the U.S. definitely believe in divine intervention. In 2018, that jumped to 61%. one of the leading demographers in america ryan burge says that's a striking and refutes the idea that belief in the supernatural is rooted out by increased levels of educational entertainment

so most people live today and in the past educated uneducated the west not the west believe in the supernatural are they all mistaken one way to assess this is to look back now i actually don't think this is circular you don't need the existence of god for miracles at least to identify them. All we need is the possibility that God exists, then a miracle is possible. So to make miracles impossible and begin an investigation that miracles didn't happen, one would actually have to prove that God doesn't exist. If you can't prove God doesn't exist and you possibly exist, then miracles are possible and one should follow the evidence where it leads. And when I have time, maybe in the question-answer, we'll get into this.

We both mentioned it would be the resurrection. Gary Habermas was here a few years ago, one of the leading experts on the resurrection. He studied 4,500 academic sources since 1975 and assesses certain facts, you might say, historically speaking, that are, number one, evidentially supported, and number two, the majority of scholars agree on them. Jesus lived, died, tomb was empty. disciples report having experiences of the risen Jesus, then you have James and Paul who are not members of the 12, willing to suffer and die for the belief they had seen the risen Jesus.

What's interesting and unique about Christianity is that it's founded on a single, testable, historical event, namely a miracle. But the other way to consider miracles, not only the past would be in the present. Arguably, the world's expert on this is Craig Keener, a preeminent New Testament scholar. He was writing a commentary on the book of Acts and thought, you know what, there's a lot of miracle claims here. I wonder if miracles are being reported in the modern world. Took about a five-year study, and in 2011 wrote those two book miracles, two volumes,

in which he assessed the amount of miracle claims taking place around the world. and it's a very careful academic treatise. He reports that hundreds of millions of persons alive today claim they have witnessed or experienced miraculous healings. Hundreds of millions claim that. Now he says eyewitnesses report gospel-type miracles, the blind scene, the deaf hearing, other miraculous type events. Some miracles, he says, of course, are better tested than others.

He says sometimes miracles do not. the author of this Craig Keener himself prayed for child and had eight miscarriages it said the fact that sometimes miracles don't happen doesn't prove that miracles never happen and it reports miracles from different countries and from a variety of denominations I'm just going to give two examples that I find fascinating and by the way if that's true of hundreds of millions if we just rule out 99% of them we still have a million plus cases of people who believe they've seen the miraculous. So two quick cases, both in peer-reviewed journals. One is a 23-year-old male with gastroporesis, depended on a feeding tube since he was two weeks old. A man came in was speaking in their church who also said he had a drastic recovery from a truck that fell on his abdomen and was experienced a miracle, prayed for him, put his hands over him, and that night he ate his first meal without a tube and had the J-tube removed four months later. The author of Dr. Joshua Brown, Professor of Psychological

and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, was motivated to study this by his own healing that he considers miraculous from a rain tumor. Second one is an 18-year-old female who became legally blind over a short period of time in 1959. In 1972, after 12 years of blindness, she reportedly regained her sight spontaneously when prayed for by her husband, who was a Christian, but said the only miracles he was aware of that ever happened were actually in the Bible. And her sight remained intact for 47 years. Now, placebo is the article say can explain some phenomena, but it can't fix a stomach with the type of structure that he had nor fixed blindness. At least there's no regular reports of this happening.

So the question is, do miracles happen? I'm looking forward to getting into this and having a conversation with you. Thanks for let me share. Okay, we'll now move into some interview questions. And I will start with Dr. Rinsler. Have you had personal experience with the miraculous or with the seemingly miraculous? Well, not quite, but I can tell you the closest that I think I came. And it was a singular experience, and nothing else comes to it.

So I think I must have been 19 years old, first year at college, a wintry, snowy night. I'm laying down in my dorm bed. And looking out the window, it was just like on the quad, and it was a beautiful scene. And out of nowhere, I was overcome with this feeling of, like, everything. And it was great. It was a great feeling.

I don't know why that scene, I don't like the snow even. And how that happened, I presume it's psychology and brain chemistry, but it really did come out of nowhere. And at that time, I thought, wow, how did that? What? That was weird. And I think that's as far as I took it then. I think that's as far as I'd take it now. But I think that's as close as I can get.

Sean, do you have a response to that same question? That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing that. It might surprise you to hear me say this, because I'm a Christian theology professor. I'm pretty skeptical when I hear reports of the miraculous. This started a shift for me about five or seven years ago, when I started to study in depth cases of near-death experiences, cases of demonic possession,

and cases of miracles, and have been pleasantly surprised at this. Now, I could tell you some stories of answered prayer, of encounters with people that I believe are supernatural, but I'm going to do something. I'm actually real curious. I have no idea how you're going to respond to this. I'm going to ask you that question. I want to know from you how many of you here don't raise your hand yet believe you have seen with your own eyes or personally experience a miracle now you carefully

to find a miracle but I want to make sure I'm the same page what I don't mean is you needed a Mother's Day gift and you're like I'm going to the mall I need one parking spot open found a perfect gift there must be a God that's not what I mean maybe that happened to you maybe God can do that great but you understand why our skeptical friends would not be convinced in a minute i only just raise your hand because i'm going to be gone on a flight tomorrow my 12 year old son and i will be out of here but you're going to be around maybe having conversations with each other about this if you think you have seen or experienced something that can be described as a miracle raise your hand right now

how many of you in this room put it up put them up high if you've seen or experienced what you believe is a supernatural miracle at least I think a quarter to a third is fair yeah wow okay talk to each other about it look around with somebody who had their hand up or didn't have their hand up that was really interesting by the way yeah good experiment okay another question how did you come to believe what you now believe about the miraculous and how have your views changed over time and what caused those changes we'll start with you dr mcdowell so i i grew up and my dad is an evangelist an apologist maybe some of you recognize the name josh mcdowell he's probably spoken to more young people on college campuses than anybody

in history written over 150 books an evangelist with crew i tell you this because this is a family i grew up in and i thought basically You know, it just made sense to me. And then in the 90s, when I was in college, I first came across some of the atheist secular web was kind of built on responding to some of my dad's content. And I came across skeptics and atheists and doctors and lawyers responding. It, like, rattled me, Paul.

I was like, wow, these are really smart people who don't buy this. And I remember saying to my dad, face-to-face, I don't know what he was going to say. I said, Dad, I'm not sure that I'm convinced that Christianity is true. I don't know how he's going to respond. he looked at me right in the eyes and he goes son i think that's great and i was like did you hear anything that i just said and he goes you can't live on my beliefs you got to find out what you think is true and follow it he goes only leave your faith if you

think it's not true follow truth he told me that and then he said your mom and i would love you no matter what and so i don't want to over dramatize it but that was like i was reading atheists i could quote reading buddhist reading other stuff trying to make sense if this was true for me. So I wouldn't really say I own my faith in college. But as far as the supernatural, I hit it at this earlier, it was probably six or eight years ago. I decided to really study the literature on near-death experiences. I didn't expect to find it compelling. I've heard too many false stories, people making stuff up to sell books. I had nothing at stake. I was like, I'm an apologist if this is here, great, but I doubt it's any good. I was reading very careful

peer-reviewed accounts documented going, there's something to this. I think it was demonic, with the miracles. So about eight to ten years ago, my confidence in this really, really grew. And I think we're at a cultural moment right now where we're seeing actually more and more people talk about this and show interest in this and actually believe in supernatural. Dr. Rensler? So I think earlier, like let's say in my... 20s, I was probably more inclined to not be a skeptical.

I think I remember a book called The Reenchantment of the World that I was quite taken with and I was looking at how I could apply this to music and looking back on it now, my opinion is that, well, this is all just, it's all in the air and there's nothing, there's no foundation to it. But it made a certain amount of sense at the time. And I think the reason why I eventually changed my mind about that sort of thing is that I began to very slowly and gradually learn how to think logically and to the best I can and principles of skepticism and began to apply those more and more and more. And I think that process is still continuing with me. So I think that's how I've come to them my my current position.

Thank you. Okay, the next question. We'll start with you, Dr. Rinsler. Much of the world remains unexplored and mysterious. Reports of miracles are by their very nature mysterious, and reflecting on them can cause doubt, no matter what your view of them might be. People of deep religious faith

can sometimes wonder whether purported miracles in the sacred scriptures actually occurred. And atheists sometimes wonder whether there might be a God who actually works in the world. What would each of you say is the one thing that has caused you the most doubt about your own position about miracles?

That's a good question. The miracle that has a seemingly unexplainable circumstance around it. If you just take what you know and you hear a miracle report and, you know, I have to admit, I didn't read all of Craig Keener's two volumes.

He didn't even read all two volumes. I mean, they're so big. That's an amazing work of scholarship. It is. But scanning through it, there are some miracles that I go, geez, how could that not be something supernatural? But the problem is, is that I'm just me, and in fact, I am surely an amateur at figuring out what miracles are.

But I've read enough miracle reports to know that, oh, I would have never thought of that. That's why that's not a miracle. It would have never occurred to me. So that when I read a miracle report, it says, geez, how can that be? I can't trust myself to make that judgment. There was a miracle report about a woman who was hearing the details of an operation when supposedly the operation was going to shut her brain down so that there's no way she could have heard what was happening.

And as I read that report, I thought, well, how can that be? The doctors knew they were freezing her body and her brain had no activity until I researched it, and anesthesiologist said, well, but you have to note that what she heard was happening not when the brain was shut down, but before that step in the operation and went through other details about how the anesthetic could happen, but not what made her unconscious, et cetera, et cetera. And that kind of explained it. Oh, okay, this anesthesiologist, well, he's an anesthesiologist, he's an expert.

I would have no way to imagine that. So that, I think I'm humble about whether I can really decide something's a miracle or not until it's really thoroughly researched. Dr. McDowell, what would you say has caused you the most doubt about your own position about miracles? I'd say the times God doesn't answer prayers. I think any honest person would have to admit that. I have two simultaneous thoughts since I've been studying this. One is my confidence that God answers prayers, and does miracles, has gone up. At the same time, because I'm more confident, it makes it that much harder when God doesn't answer prayers and heal. I think a friend of mine, some of you might recognize the name Nabil Qureshi. He was a former Muslim, and because of interactions with

David Wood, an apologist, YouTuber, for years, I think it went on. They were debating the resurrection in the Quran and the Bible, ended up becoming a Christian. He had to be a Christian. He had to what he described as like tons of visions and dreams about Jesus, came to the Christian faith, died, I don't know, six or eight years ago in his mid-30s. Absolutely brilliant, brilliant. And I remember when he had a kind of stomach cancer, my dad looked at me, he's like,

why wouldn't God just take me? I don't know the answer to that. For my perspective, it makes no sense. in God, he's like on your A-team. If you're going to heal anybody, heal this guy. So I think unanswered prayers in the times miracles don't happen. Now, I won't go into detail unless you want to later, how I think, theoretically, you make sense of that and should expect that on one level, but it's hard and it's difficult, and it makes no sense. Thanks. Okay, we'll start the next question with you, Dr. McDowell.

why does belief or unbelief in the miraculous matter if miracles actually happen how should that affect how we live and if they don't happen then how should that affect how we live that's a great question because i think whether there's miracles or not tells us the kind of universe that we live in look whether you're christian or an atheist or something else i'm going to assume all of us agree that truth matters and we should try to align our lives with reality. If there's not miracles and we live in a pale blue dot, live a life that reflects that. Now, we'll leave it at that. If there is a God and he's made us and there is a supernatural realm, that changes everything. I mean, Paul says if there's no resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, he says, you might as well eat, drink, and be merry, for we're all going to die

And that's basically the end. Paul writes out in 1st Corinthians 15. He says, but if Jesus has risen from the grave, then actually it confirms that Jesus is God. It confirms there's life after death. And it means we're actually forgiven. Forgiveness is real.

So I think whether there's miracles or not, it's hard actually for me to think of a question that matters more than whether or not God exists and whether there's miracles or not. So Paul writes in 1st Thessalonians 4, because he believes in the resurrection of Jesus, that we grieve differently with hope because of it. So I think whether miracles happen or not changes everything about how we live, how we should treat people, and so on. Do you agree?

I'm really curious your take on this one. that it's a really important question and it would change how you live most definitely wow if miracles were possible how cool would that be I mean I can't use my enthusiasm for it being so cool to affect whether you know how I determine whether they did happen or not but yeah miracles would be cool that would be great to see if I can squeeze in one one comment about Paul saying, look, if the resurrection didn't happen, then eat drink and be merry. I want to speak in favor of eating and drinking and be married.

Or maybe I should ask you, what is his implication there that it's merely eating and drinking and be merry? Or no, go ahead, then this is a life you have and enjoy it. Do you understand? Can you imagine what the implication was? I took it more negatively, but maybe not. I think he, yeah, that is an interesting question because there's the existentialist response. It says if there's no God, death is the end,

enjoy life, seize the day, live it to its fullest. So Paul's like, if that's the case, just do it. Well, that's a very positive. That's a positive take. On the flip side would be the nihilist take that goes if there's no God and there's no afterlife, there's no free will, there's no thing. There's no human value.

There's no purpose to life. The only question is what Camus asked, should I commit suicide or not? That's the more negative one. Right, right, right. Yeah, so that I would agree with Paul in that sense that if there's a positive, I mean, how many people ate today?

How many people enjoyed it? You should enjoy good food. It's one of the great pleasures of traveling. is eating different food. I enjoy drinking this. And being merry is great too. I think I've strayed from the question a little bit. But not in that order, drinking and then being married,

just to, you know, save me here. I wonder, Dr. Rinsler, given what Dr. McDowell said, if there are no miracles and therefore no supernatural and all the rest, then that seems to undercut meaning. Do you agree with that? Well, it undercuts meaning with a capital M kind of by definition. I mean, if there's no God to give meaning with a capital M, then if you don't think there's a God,

that meaning with a capital M is gone. I think that's pretty clear. But any meaning is certainly not gone. I mean, it's part of the humanistic. philosophy that says you need to create your own meaning. And you actually don't create it out of thin air either because we are, our structure and our function points us in a certain direction. We're social animals. We want to get along with each other. We have survived this well because we get along with each other as well as we can. Sometimes we don't get along with

each other. But that's how, as a species, we've made our mark in the world and have succeeded as much as we can. So it's not like when you create meaning, you're creating it out of thin air. I think I said at the other Veritas form that I did several years ago. It's not like a mother when she gives birth to her child, has a 50-50 coin flip. Should I love my child or not? It could go either way, let's see, what shall I decide? No, not at all. Women have a evolutionarily

constructed tendency to love their children deeply, and we see this, we can observe this in the world. If they didn't, those children wouldn't survive and the species wouldn't survive. That's why it's there. It has an evolutionary value to it. So that is incredibly meaningful for that

for that mother, regardless of whether there's a God or not. I think the challenge of being, I suspect this is just a difference between how we see it, top-down meaning versus bottom-up meaning. So I would argue if you lose top-down meeting, sure, there's biological ways we might flourish more than others. We're wired to love our child, and so we behave that way and feel good when we do. but that's not an objectively better way to live than somebody who chooses differently

because we just happen to evolve with certain instincts and feelings. So we lose God and we lose meaning. What comes with that is being able to make objective value statements about other people who say I'm creating my own life differently. I think we lose the basis to make those kind of moral judgments. Would be the critique one one response. So the work the the the objective subjective thing is

I mean you might think it's logically obvious something is either objective or subjective and that's true But I think in this case it cuts across the question in an odd way and I can show it to you this way are the rules of chess objective or subjective but we created the rules of chess they don't have to be that way. It's not like objective like this water bottle is here. We don't have to have chess that way. Once you establish those rules, then there are objective moves in chess. Yeah, you move that rook there and the game is over. That's objectively true. But you had to start from the game of chess to begin with. And in a similar way, I always think that for morality, you have to start from the position that morality means, by definition, the well-being of conscious creatures.

Once you start there, then you can say that there are objective things that are going to enhance that, not enhance it, and there will be many questions that, well, maybe we don't know if this is going to enhance or not. And for who? And what, how do we total it all up? That can be really a complicated question. I actually agree with you. If we start with the assumption that we ought to work for the well-being of other species, then we can assess certain behavior that advances that and doesn't advance it. But I don't know where you get that assumption from within a naturalistic universe

and why anybody who says, I don't adopt that assumption, I prefer a different one, is bound by that assumption at all. Now, within a Christian framework, because God is good and God is just, and humans are made in God's image, it's built into the things. fabric of the universe that we ought to behave in a way towards the well-being and good of others. But it seems like you're starting, and this is what Sam Harris does in the moral landscape. He's like, you just have to grant that we ought to operate towards the well-being of others. And I go, where does that ought come from?

If we're this pale blue dot and we just came here in a completely purposeless, meaningless, accidental fashion, I don't think you get that well-being. You have to assume it. I think I would disagree with Sam Harris. I didn't use the word that you ought to care about the well-being of conscious creatures. I said the definition of morality should be the well-being of conscious creatures. I mean, I think people should, like a personal opinion, and I think that that will enhance everybody if people care about the well-being of conscious creatures, but ought.

There's no ought with a capital O. I would still say, yeah, you ought to, but that's a small. O and not a capital O. Okay, so last question. We've got to move on. Yes, sorry. So if I don't want to play chess, I don't have to play chess. If I say I don't want to play the moral game, then I don't have to play the moral game.

And there's no ought for me within the system. Would you agree with that? I think so. Okay. So it seems, all right, should I let it. Yeah. It feels like it is a relativistic subjective system then, not an objective system. Well, you have to make that initial move.

After that, it's objectively true what will enhance the well-being of conscious creatures and what won't. And the other factor here is that we are built, not by a builder. I was wondering if you're going to go there. Our function and structure is such that that's in the vast majority of the vast majority of people. And the people that that's not in, we call sociopaths and psychopaths, and we deal with them. Okay, I have a follow-up question for you, Sean. You touched on this topic earlier. As a Christian, what would you say to a fellow Christian or religious theist who has prayed for a miracle,

maybe for the healing of a loved one, but without success? And why is it that miracles of healing happen for some people, but not for others? I've dealt with this very personally with family friends that did not get an answer to prayer. I don't sit down and tell them, well, here's what the Bible says about this. I literally listen to them and I cry with them and I make them dinner and I ask them how I can be present and love them through this. Then at some point if they say, hey, why does God make sense of this? I might still say, you know I'm an apologist, right?

I just want to make sure I'm helping you. Do you really want to know what I think theologically? Romans 12 says, be happy with those who are happy, be sad with those who are sad. When somebody, we've had family, pray for the loss of a child, the last thing they need is an apologetic or theological reason why God might allow this to happen.

now there might come a time where they want to make sense of it and I could walk through scripture with them and give them certain principles to try to make sense of this but I would not launch into that at the beginning whatsoever I would listen look Job's friends by the way did everything right until they opened their mouths they sat with them for a week and mourned and then when they opened their mouths and blamed them a bad theology came out

I actually think that's a Christian response when somebody's hurting Is there something you might say if later on on reflection they did want to talk about? Yes, and then they, so frame the question exactly what they would say. Yeah, re-framed. Why did, you know, why when I prayed for this miracle, seemingly in full faith, it didn't happen? I'd probably look at them and say, I don't know the answer to that. we don't know the answer to certain why questions unless god tells us i don't know god's mind sometimes god answers prayers sometimes god doesn't answer prayers now there are some things in the

bible where we're given hints like it says you have not because you ask not sometimes miracles happen because people don't pray and actually literally trust god for it in this case they did trust god and they prayed. So I don't want to shame somebody. He goes, oh, I just didn't have enough faith. That's not my point. I would probably look at him and say, I don't know the answer to that. It's interesting, Paul did miracles, but there's also Paul had a sickness and a thorn in his flesh that God didn't heal. Why didn't he heal Paul? I don't know the answer to that. So I'm not going to pretend to give a simplistic answer when there's factors that I don't know. But I could talk about why I think God is good, why I think God does miracles, why I think the Bible is true, but why he doesn't perform a particular miracle, I think sometimes in life we understand and we learn oftentimes looking back, but oftentimes not in the moment itself. That's a biblical view. This is not the same, but I went through about, I don't know if any of you happen to follow what I do. About two years ago, I went through some of the worst pain in my life for three.

months. It was agonizing. I almost get tears thinking about it. And I prayed for God to heal me. And I'll be really honestly. I one point was like, God, I can't even thank you for this. It hurts so bad. But I hope you'd give me the faith to do so. And it was not long ago, I told my wife, I said, you know what? I actually, I think maybe I get it now. Why God didn't heal that? looking back. Okay, I have one more question before we get to our audience questions. We have here two clearly, generally reasonable people discussing

miracles. Generally reasonable. We'll give each other that. I'll take that. Both clearly earnest inquirers. And I'm wondering, does the fact that there are, you know that there are equally smart earnest inquirers about this topic who disagree with each other. Does the fact that you know about that disagreement give you pause or any hesitancy about your own position? And if it doesn't, why doesn't it? Oh, it absolutely does. Of course. I mean, I have spent in my life not, no little time, thinking, okay, so if this is true about atheism and religion, how do I know that? And what's the argument against that?

And to engage with people that think differently than you is the way that steel sharpens steel. And there have been times where, in fact, it happened just last week where I was looking at an issue of religious in atheism and I thought, oh, what do I do with that? And it caused me no little lack of sleep, literally. Two nights, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking, what? I finally worked my way through it. I have not converted. Sorry.

But if you're not critically examining what you think, The unexamined life is not worth living, and the unexamined thought is not worth thinking. First off, you're shattering my dreams, Paul. You're a retired professor, and you're still losing sleep. Darn it. With that said, no question about it. I think about this a ton. I'll look at a political view and be like, there's smart people on the other side.

Do they see something I don't see? All sorts of issues I do that. And all I can tell you is I ask myself certain questions. I all say, do I just believe this because it's convenient? Do I have the courage to believe something if it cost me something? I ask myself that a lot. And so the best way to mitigate this is I have certain people in my life that push back on me. My doctoral dissertation advisor, I wrote on the death of the apostles, did they really die as martyrs?

And he'd say to me, go, Sean, would an atheist or a Muslim, a cessation? it like you did. You've got to do your best to look at it through that lens. So my podcast, YouTube channels, I listen to people regularly of different views. I ask myself that a lot. And that's why I think, like you said, the evidence matters. At some point, God has said, what is the evidence Jesus has risen from the grave? What's the evidence the miraculous really happen? What's the evidence we have a soul or we're just a brain? And you have the courage to follow it? It's really true. really a gut question more than anything else, but probably a day doesn't go by that

I don't see something go, does that person know something that I don't know, and would I be willing to shift if it cost me something? Thank you. Okay, we're going to shift to some audience questions now. I'm noticing that some of your questions are questions that have already been dealt with to one degree or another by our speaker. So I will get to some new questions that I find really interesting. And one is this.

Can we still find value? in the stories of the Gospels. If miracles are not literal but metaphorical, what if the loaves and fishes is a miracle of generosity? Or maybe we could take it as a teaching about Jesus's way, or a teaching about how we should think about the world that doesn't require us to take them as, you know, literal miracles? Either one of you guys want to start with that? Can you get personal value from it? Sure. Can you get subjective value from it? Sure. Were the stories ever meant to be taken that way?

The answer is absolutely no. I mean, Paul says if Jesus is not risen, our faith is in vain. So he ties the truth of Christianity to whether or not Jesus actually has risen from the grave. He said, if not, we're liars, were to be pitied and we're still in our sins. That's Paul's take in 1st Corinthians. Jesus did miracles as signs of his identity. That's why he did him out of compassion, out of care, out of love for people. But distinctly to show he's the Messiah, he's the son of God, he's risen from the grave,

there's no way to take the miracles of Jesus and strip them out of the core story of the supernatural, and God acting, I think, in a way that has objective value. But I think they could have subjective value for somebody. Okay, how, let's see, they're moving around me. Here we go. How does one determine which miracles to accept, like the resurrection, the apparition at Fatima, or some personal miracle in their life? What criteria would you rely on?

Well, I guess my criteria would be kind of what I laid out. You've got to have enough evidence to outweigh what you already know that would contradict that that miracle didn't happen. By way, if I can kind of combine a previous question with this one, a miracle report that caused me a lot of pause was the Marian apparition in Egypt. over a period of, are you familiar with that? Yeah, I didn't expect you to say that. I'm fascinated. Yeah, there's a Coptic church, and these guys look up and they see this figure bathed in light,

and I can go into all the details. And I'm not sure I read a naturalistic explanation for that in my research. Maybe someone's done that, maybe fine. But that still has to happen before you can accept that as a miracle. I guess the difficulty is saying, well, if you can't explain it, does that mean it's a miracle? Does that mean that there was divine intervention there? Maybe it just means you can't explain it.

But that was a really interesting one. I think in principle, I agree with you. It's a question of the evidence. Now, how you assess a historical miracle, and by the way, that's a historical one because it's in the past versus talking to somebody who's seen a miracle. When it comes to like the resurrection of Jesus, you've got to ask the question, can I trust these sources? So Jesus turning water into wine in John chapter 2, we only have one source, John chapter 2. But the burial of Jesus, the empty tomb, appearance reports, we have multiple early sources of this. So that gives us

greater historical confidence in principle than just one source. You also look at, are there certain embarrassing elements? So one of the things that's convinced many, if not most scholars who study this, of the empty tomb would be that it was discovered by women. In that culture, a woman's testimony was not considered as significant as a man's, all four gospels report that women discovered the empty tomb. That would have been counterproductive and embarrassing. is seen in that culture. And to me goes, oh, wait a minute, this is not likely the kind of thing that they would have invented. So you look at the number of sources. You look at the reliability sources. For me, I studied the apostles. And almost all scholars agree that they report

that they had seen the risen Jesus. And then I did my dissertation on this, their willingness to suffer and die for their belief that they had seen the risen Jesus. You could come up with another story is hallucination or some other account for that but you look historically multiple sources embarrassing factors willing to suffer and die that they had seen the risen jesus to me historically these are compelling components of a larger case when we have sources for miracles that are hundreds of years removed deeply contradictory there's agendas behind it that's when i get a little bit skeptical or a lot skeptical in the present one thing I found interesting is when people for example 75% of medical doctors you talk about somebody who's trained and who's educated and who's who's

built to trust their senses and science is like there's something supernatural going on that's interesting to me the number of people that have supernatural phenomena that are not trying to sell books I'm not trying to get famous, hesitant to share it, and then still do so. That also gives me pause and thinks, wait a minute, there might be something to this, and some miracle cases where there's multiple witnesses who see it. And in some cases like Candy Brown's book, which is with Harvard Press in 2012, they actually have medical documentation of people before, and afterwards they show the graphs.

And so these are the kinds of things that I would look for. for if I was going to believe a miracle claim? So I would agree with that with one proviso. And I think what happens is that we underestimate how much things, how many things we already know, and how strongly that we know them, really counts for. So I'll try to do this quick. I have three scenarios.

If you come to me and say, I want a car. I already know that cars exist and that average everyday people like you own a car. So I would be rational to say, yeah, I believe you. And I think we do this a lot in our life. But if you come to me and say, I own a tank. Okay, we know tanks exist. We don't have to worry about that. But we don't know that everyday people own tanks.

So I'm going to need a lot more than just you saying it. And the third scenario is, what if you come to me and say, I own an interstellar spaceship, and we can go from here to Alpha Centauri in 12 minutes, faster than a speed of light. Now, we don't know that that thing exists. We don't know that the speed of light can possibly be exceeded. And how can a person like you even own something like that?

Let's say you gave me a document that was the complete blueprints for that spaceship. And if I can borrow from Star Trek, shows you how the warp drive works and the equations and how many dilithium crystals, you've got to put in there, the whole thing. Would it be rationales relieved that that works? You'd have to have the experts come in and look at the diagrams

and even test it out. Like the guys who did cold fusion several years ago, they thought they had nuclear fusion at room temperature on a desktop, and then the other scientists look at it and they go, no, that's not what you say it is. So the standard of what you need, if something is really against natural law, like bodies don't come back to life.

If you were just looking at the tank, maybe there'd be enough evidence, but this is a spaceship we're looking at, not a tank. Okay, we have a couple of questions that overlap, so I'm going to try to run them together. Would you consider the Big Bang, or perhaps the Cambrian explosion, to be a miracle in regards to your own definition of a miracle?

and related question. If there's no supernatural creator, wouldn't the Big Bang be considered the greatest miracle of them all, something coming out of nothing? Okay. I'm not aware that scientists, the scientific theory of the Big Bang

is that something came from nothing because there's an amount of time that is incredibly minuscule called the Plank Time, past which scientists cannot say anything. And so you have the Big Bang that happened. Then you have the Plank Time. After the Plank Time, scientists can say, yeah, we know that this is how it happened.

But before the plank time, hands off, can't, there's no even way for them to figure out how to investigate it yet. So they don't, the scientific theory, the Big Bang does not say that something came from nothing. At best you can say, something came from, I don't know. That's as best as they can do. What was the first part of the question? It was about if there's no supernatural creator, I think you were addressing that. Wouldn't the Big Bang be considered a great miracle, the greatest miracle of all? I would look at the Big Bang as an amazing event, but to call it a miracle, again, would necessitate divine intervention.

And I think that's an argument from ignorance. Well, we don't know how the Big Bang happened, therefore God did it. If we don't know how the Big Bang happened, let's just stay there. until we figure it out. And maybe we'll never figure it out, and we'll have to say, yeah, we still don't know. Arno Penzias was one of the scientists who helped establish the Big Bang as a scientific theory.

In 1965, he won an award, a Nobel Prize, for some of his scientific advancements in this realm. He specifically said he made the point that this seems to point towards a supernatural cause, a divine kind of origin, so to speak, for the universe. I don't remember the exact words that he used, but that's the point that he made. Now, why? Part of Big Bang cosmology is a recognition that the universe is finite

in terms of arguably matter and also in terms of time. It seemed to have a beginning. It's not eternal. And I think there's good arguments put forth for this, such as the second law, thermodynamics, energy, running down, the red shift, the microwave background radiation, points towards the universe seeming to have a beginning. Well, there's also philosophical arguments for this, and this is what surprised so many people that the universe seemed to have a beginning.

Raises a question, where did the universe come from? What's the cause for it? Well, if the universe began to exist, and that includes space and time and matter, then it seems to me it's not an argument from ignorance, but the best explanation is a cause outside of space and time, very powerful. I think you could argue personal, obviously very smart, timeless, changeless, and causeless that brought it into existence. So I actually think the Big Bang is that piece of a scientific argument for the beginning of the universe, or philosophical argument, the cosmological argument, that points towards a beginner of the universe, not an argument from silence, but from what we actually know about causation. Now, exactly the term miracle or not, I mean, we could quibble over that, but I think it points towards a supernatural cause pretty firmly. So in my minuscule researches, I think I'd agree that some scientists might

say, yeah, there was a beginning to the universe. I think some of them say that time itself started at the big bang. Time and space and energy started at the big bang. So I think that's potential. I think other scientists would not agree with that. So I think that's still an issue that's in flux, to my limited understanding. Majority view certainly is that the universe had a beginning. Now, I don't want to appeal to authority, obviously.

and majority position, but it is the majority view in physics and cosmology at the universe had a beginning, which just raises a question we might quibble over what caused the universe, where did it come from, what's a sufficient explanation for it? That's the question, but fair enough, we don't need to get into the weeds on. And it is certainly a philosophical question that would go beyond what we would expect scientists. I'm not an astrophysicist, are you? I stayed in a holiday day in last night. So I'm good. Okay, I can't, I'm not in a position to verify the assumption of this question, so you guys could either address the assumption of the question or the question itself. There are over 25,000 historical manuscripts that support the resurrection of

Jesus Christ. Would you say that is proof of a miracle? No. You expected me as a Christian to say this. All manuscripts, manuscripts are ancient handwritten copies of ancient books. It could be Homer's writing or Herodotus or Tacitus or biblical manuscripts. So there are thousands of ancient manuscripts. When it comes to Greek manuscripts, it's probably closer to 5,000. This doesn't prove the resurrection is true. What manuscripts can do is help us carefully. reconstruct what a document originally said, then we have to assess that document if it's reliable. So if we had no manuscripts or very few, we would be skeptical about whether or not we could trust this document. But if we had a million manuscripts, it wouldn't prove something is true.

If you had five million manuscripts of Homer, it wouldn't mean that it's true. It would just help us reconstruct it carefully and accurately. I completely agree, and let me agree in a slightly different way. I'd like to suggest everybody learn a little bit about a syllogism, which is a logical argument, because it'll help you clarify exactly what you're saying and show the support for it. So the way a syllogism would work here was we have 25, premise 1, 25,000 copies of this manuscript. The conclusion, I'm skipping a step, is that therefore miracles happen. what's the middle thing you have to also claim

to get from the first one to the second one? If you can identify what that is, then we could start talking about and maybe we would verify that all that's correct. That's just a way to clarify your thinking because, yeah, just because there's a lot of manuscripts doesn't mean that what's in the manuscripts is true. Unless you could come up with that middle premise somehow

and then you might have something. That would be the best way to really strengthen that argument. Okay, here's a question for Dr. McDowell. If a claim can't be falsified, it's not testable. What evidence would you accept as proving that miracles do not or cannot happen? Well, if you could show that it's impossible for God to exist, then we know miracles are impossible. Now, some people have tried to do this with the logical problem of evil,

which I think Alvin Planega has solved. if you come up with some logical contradiction, philosophically speaking, that shows God cannot exist, then miracles are impossible. For miracles to be possible, you don't have to show that God actually exists. The burden of proof is on the skeptic or the atheist to show that God does not exist or cannot exist to prove that miracles are impossible. Logically, that follows. individual miracles. I've seen a lot of cases that I find out, oh my goodness, this person is

lying, they're trying to gain something, they're a fraud. I've seen that all the time. So individual miracles, you're just going to have to look at them historically or in the present and assess it. And I think there's probably, I don't know if I was going to say more fraud than real miracles. I have no way to assess that numerically. But there's certainly, I think you would just look at and determine if the person is not trustworthy and they're inventing it and they're making it up, that I think you can say it didn't happen. And I have a question directed to you, Dr. Rinsler. Do you have a response to Dr. McDowell's statement that the existence of miracles and God

is not a circular argument? Oh, I'm glad you asked that, because when I think somebody referenced that earlier and there was a misconception. So, and I think, correct me if this is not what this question is getting at, I'm not claiming that miracles cannot in my opening statement i did not claim that miracles can't prove the existence of god or that god cannot prove the existence of miracles i merely said that if you do the one you can't use that one to prove the first one that's all i meant did that does that address that question to some degree it does yes is there a degree it doesn't i mean i mean i'm happy

I find debates over circular reasoning sometimes to be... Circular? Well, not that enlightening, let's put it that way. Okay, here's a question that might appeal to Dr. McDowell Moore, but maybe either of you. How can one find the gospels reliable for the resurrection if they are based on anonymous sources that scholar Dr. Erman calls the inventions of the author. I'm not convinced that they are anonymous sources. Interestingly enough, though, even if they were,

it wouldn't fall that a source is not reliable. I'm actually did a whole interview on this with a former atheist, a cold case detective, who's never lost a case in court, by the way. Some of you might recognize the name Jay Warner Wallace. He said, we can analyze a source if it's reliable. reliable or not, if it's good, trustworthy testimony, with the words, with the language, the way stories are told, even if it's anonymous, that doesn't mean a source is worthless, historically

speaking. So if the Gospels were anonymous, I still think there's hidden coincidences between the Gospels and between John that show a kind of intertextuality and, I think, a kind of reliability, undesigned coincidences. I think you point to archaeology. You can point to the testimony. You can point to details that get right. You can make a case even if it's anonymous. But I don't think the gospel are anonymous. The early sources we have of early Christian writers,

the end of the first century, end of the second century, are referring to the writers of the particular books sometimes by name, referring to in that fashion. And interestingly enough, the gospel names, Given that they were copied and they were spread out very quickly, it would be hard to have such agreement about who wrote each of the Gospels if they were being passed around completely anonymously from the beginning. There's no debate about who wrote them. And they're also not the names that we would actually invent if the names were being invented. Luke was not one of the 12.

Neither was Mark. Matthew was a tax collector. John's the only one you probably would invent. So I don't think they're anonymous, for the reasons I gave. If they were anonymous, it still would not make them historically in principle, not reliable documents. We'd still have to assess it on its merits. So I'd like to question an assumption in that question about whether we say something's reliable or not. My same critique here goes to whether something to fact or not.

We only know things to degrees of certainty. 99.99% percent, 51%, just barely more likely than not, et cetera. So if a source is, we shouldn't say if a source is reliable. The source is reliable about this, about that, because we can confirm this. If a source was reliable about, you know, plain everyday historical, or I mean geographic details, say, like in the Gospels, does that mean they're reliable about the supernatural elements? Not necessarily.

So rather than something's entirely reliable or someone's entirely reliable and therefore you buy the whole thing, you look at it on a claim-by-claim basis. Thank you. I want to say, you've asked a lot of really interesting philosophical questions, but some of them go pretty far afield from the miracles topic. So I'm going to ask one more question that is on miracles, and it's this. Can you help me reconcile the arbitrary and seemingly random nature of miracles with events of mass genocide and suffering that are allowed to happen? Can you say that again?

That went in a place I did not expect. Yeah, so the idea is the question is like, how do we make sense of the fact that we have occasional seemingly random arbitrary miracles that happen? And also we see events of mass genocide really bad things. So how do we reconcile the fact that there are occasional and seemingly random good things that happen that are miraculous versus. all the bad things that we know happen in our world. This is really a question of the problem of evil. Why is there suffering and why is there evil? I'm somewhat hesitant to even jump into this.

I've spent years thinking about whether I was going to do a show on why God allows the Holocaust. Just recorded it. Have not posted it yet. But was hesitant because there's something like presumptuous about even attempting to explain something that's so egregious in itself. But I felt the need to do it because this is a real question that people have. So in some ways, I feel like that question is so big.

That's an entire evening that it can't do it short shrift. I would just say, I guess the one thing I would say is, yeah, it does feel arbitrary. I get it. the question is should we know and be able to see god's divine plan from the top down and understand why things happen as they do i'm not sure that we should know that but if i'm in a room and i say hey there's an elephant and you can't see one you should be able to see the elephant but i say there's a flea and you don't see it i don't know that you should expect to be able to see the flea. Biblically speaking, should we know exactly why God does some

miracles and not others? I'm not sure that we should actually be able to know that question definitively and clearly. A ton more can be said, but that was just one slight area I would begin to maybe reframe the question. But admittedly, that's as hard of a question as they're get, and I feel like we need a full evening plus to get there. Agreed. Dr. Rinsler, do you have a brief? Yeah. So I think what I'm going to say is really alongside of you. I'm not agreeing with you, but I'm not trying to disagree with what you just said. It's alongside it.

The one thing that bothers me is that something like the problem of evil, as well as just conflict between religions, there's no way to ever resolve it. It's like that there's no method. There's no project where that's ever going to get answered. And from the Christian standpoint, we might forever stay in, we can't know that. And I contrast that with the atheist, humanistic, scientific worldview, if I may, where we've got a method and a process to resolve problems. And when nothing works, we say we don't know,

that sits better, I think, then just there's no way we can never even address it or have any method to figure it out. So one of the things that my friend and I draw in this interview is we say every single belief system has to address why the world is broken and why they're suffering. Every belief system does. On atheism, if there is no objective meaning

and no objective morality. I'm not sure you can get evil within itself and call the Holocaust evil. I'm not sure you can get objective human value and duties to one another that you are bound to, if you don't want to play the game, so to speak, of actually having duties to love your neighbor. every world view has to make sense of evil and suffering on one level or another to me when it's all said and done

i actually i'm a christian because i think christianity offers the best doesn't mean i have every answer to evil and suffering i've talked tonight about unanswered prayers that doesn't make sense to me but when you look at the sovereignty of god when you look at the person of jesus It's unique to Christianity that God steps into human race, takes on our suffering, knows what it's like to hurt and be mistreated and be betrayed, dies, rises on the third day, conquering the grave, and offers hope and forgiveness for people who believe in him. of course I haven't laid out the evidence in any detail, I get that, but realize the problem of evil and suffering is a problem for every worldview. The question is not, can I explain all the details in particular? The question is which worldview offers the most existential and philosophically sound response? That's where I think the person of Jesus stepping into our evil, doing miracle,

showing power as a sign of what is yet to come, I find the most compelling, although we won't know and see things until we look back, like I said before. Sorry to go long, but they brought up evil at the end. I mean, my goodness. It's a big topic. Well, it's about time for us to wrap up,

and I have just a few short concluding remarks about our time here today. Tonight we've heard some reflective thoughts about miracles from our speakers. And in today's highly polarized world, it's really refreshing to witness to people who can disagree about something in a civil and respectful way. And I think the Veritas Forum serves as a model for how truly helpful dialogue among people who disagree can work. Sometimes a semi-formal structure like this can really help. And you might think about setting up structures like that among your friends to have helpful discussions like this.

But even so, we've barely scratched the surface of a very long and fascinating subject that resists easy, abstract answers. What we think about whether miracles occur will certainly depend on our life experiences. And I think we do well to remind ourselves that we really do have differing life experiences. And the fact that we have these differing life experiences means that we bring different sets of evidence to bear on our own views about miracles. And because we don't all have the same evidence, it may well be rational for you to believe that miracles actually occur, and it might be rational for your neighbor to believe that they don't happen. And reflection on the fact that we do have differing life experiences and thus differing sets of

evidence can help us to see how important it is for us to talk to each other. Much of the world and our human place in the world remains mysterious, and some aspects of the world, such as whether miracles occur and what our attitude toward miracles should be, can be of great existential concern to us. Thus, if we really want the truth, we should not shy away from honest discussion with each other, including with those who disagree with us. To know the truth about our mysterious world requires all the help we can get. So I want to thank you, Dr. McDowell, and Dr. Rinsler, for showing us how this might be a tempted.

Good job. Good. That was fun. That was really fun. Well done.